


The Ghost of a Ghost

by lilacsigil



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Background Poly, Dreams, Multi, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21812356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: After a twenty-five year search, Albert saw Dale for just a few moments before he vanished again.
Relationships: Albert Rosenfield & Constance Talbot, Dale Cooper/Albert Rosenfield, Dale Cooper/Diane Evans (Twin Peaks), Dale Cooper/Harry Truman, Denise Bryson/Dale Cooper, Diane Evans/Albert Rosenfield, Tamara "Tammy" Preston & Albert Rosenfield
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Ghost of a Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tiriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiriel/gifts).



The Ghost of a Ghost

On Wednesdays the club usually played avant-garde jazz, not Albert's favourite, but the band was obviously in a mellow mood tonight, with a Brazilian drummer edging them further into samba rhythms. 

Denise slipped into the seat opposite him. "I thought you said this club was terrible for dancing on Wednesdays? This music is all but begging us to take a spin around the floor."

"Guest drummer," Albert replied. "Anyway, it was you who wanted to meet up."

"I did!" 

The waiter drifted past and Albert ordered a beer for himself, house red for Denise. 

"Albert, I had a visit from Agent Preston earlier this week."

"Preston? Is she trying to get re-assigned or something? I hope not. She's starting to get the hang of what we do. Crack shot, too."

Denise smiled and sipped the wine the waiter had brought. "This is very pleasant, thank you, Albert. Also, I seem to remember you lodging an official protest when Cole brought her on board."

"You remember me attempting to lodge an official protest! You wouldn't accept it until I'd worked with her for at least three months. And you're the damn Chief of Staff! Even if I'd gone over your head it would have been kicked back to you."

"And I was right, wasn't I? These days you're concerned about your little taskforce losing her. But that's not what she came to see me about."

"Okay, good. What the hell's this all about then?"

"Agent Preston was concerned about you."

Albert rolled his eyes. "Oh. That's all."

"Don't give me that, Albert." Denise took out her phone. "She made notes: twenty-two occasions where you questioned your own judgment, nine occasions when you expressed hopelessness, eleven occasions when you talked about retiring, seven occasions when you expressed 'unhappiness or misery'."

Albert swigged his beer. "One of the things I like about Preston is that she's got the emotional range of a pebble. One of the things I'm neutral on is that she's also got the emotional understanding of a pebble. I'm fine, Denise. It's been a tough time and I can't say I'm sleeping great, but I'm fine."

"I'm so pleased to hear that you're fine, Albert. So you won't mind if I ask you how it was seeing Dale Cooper again? Or seeing him and Diane Evans vanish shortly afterwards?"

The beer bottle hit the table with some force, punctuating a quiet moment in a piano solo. 

Denise put her hand over Albert's. He noticed that she had a fresh and very professional French polish. She didn't spend much time in the field these days. "And there's my answer. Albert, I miss him too. What does Gordon Cole say about it?"

Albert leaned back in his chair for a moment to fully compose himself. Oddly enough, it was the Yogic breathing that Coop had taught him that did the trick. "Gordon says case closed. And there's enough left over from the investigation into Major Briggs's death to keep our taskforce working for a decade yet. Even if the most bizarre thing that happens is Tammy Preston somehow deciphering an actual emotion."

"So he's distracting you from finding Coop?"

"Not exactly. I haven't tried. I'm of the opinion that if he wanted to be found, he would have left a clue or two. But Diane…"

"What about Diane?"

"Diane was helping Cooper, but I honestly don't know how much say she had in it. That thing using her face…well, I can't exactly blame it, either. Not as if it was betraying us for fun. It was under fake Cooper's control, utterly and completely, until right before the end. But I felt responsible for it, and for the real Diane. Nobody…" Albert finished his beer in one long swig. "Nobody was looking out for her. Even Coop was using her, and it doesn't sit right with me."

Denise seemed surprised, and Albert couldn't blame her: she probably hadn't heard such a flow of words from him in years, if ever. "You and Diane –"

Albert gestured with his hands. "So there was me and Coop, and Diane and Coop, and for a while there Diane and me, while we were looking for Coop. But that stopped after a few years, and Diane pulled away from us all. Still, at least we know why, now: that wasn't Diane anymore."

"And the Twin Peaks case that started all this?"

"It started before that, but Laura Palmer disappearing? Yeah, that kicked off an entire shitstorm of consequences. A shit hurricane, even."

A tired expression passed across Denise's face, before she straightened up and looked Albert directly in the eye. "Diane Evans and Dale Cooper were both Bureau employees, and, as such, fall under my jurisdiction. I'm going to assign you and Preston to look for them."

"You think Gordon won't fight that?"

"I think Gordon Cole has used up all his favours taking off to run around the country after Coop. He's Deputy Director, not Regional Bureau Chief these days, and he doesn't have the discretion to concentrate on a single case anymore. The paperwork alone is going to keep him busy for the rest of the year."

"Huh. You really did get into the politics of this place, didn't you, Denise?"

"I certainly did. So I'm going to poach your little taskforce from Cole for a while, and send you after Diane Evans and, if possible, Dale Cooper. It will give the Bureau gossips something to talk about, at least. They can all claim I'm still hung up on Coop."

Albert huffed out a laugh, weirdly relieved not be the only person on board this ridiculous plan. Denise's thing with Coop had been over a long time ago, but nobody who knew Coop would forget him. 

Denise sipped her wine. "I'll have the paperwork done by tomorrow morning. All expenditure reports to be lodged with my office directly. Make sure you're out of DC before Director Cole hears about it."

Albert ran a hand over his eyes, deeply touched. "Just so that it doesn't come off as sarcastic: thank you. I'm going to have words with Preston about reporting me, later."

"Oh, leave her alone. She was right to bring it to me. And now, Albert, that dance?"

"Sure," Albert said, grudgingly, but he got to his feet lighter than when he had walked in, and their turn around the dance floor was equally light, existing in a dimension made only of the ephemeral music and their mortal bodies.

"Preston!" Albert barked as he walked in the door of the Blue Rose Taskforce office the next morning.

"Good morning." Her face was calm, though he could hear her rapidly tapping a pen against the underside of the table. 

"Buckhorn, South Dakota."

"I agree that there's a lot to do there, but last time you mentioned it to Director Cole he didn't hear a word we said for hours on end."

Albert brandished the travel forms in front of her. "We'll need to do an inventory of what equipment we need to take and what we can borrow or assemble once we're there. We might be heading to Twin Peaks after that."

"Those forms are signed by Chief Bryant." Tammy looked uncertain.

"Yes, I know you went to her. And you were right, dammit. She's going to keep Gordon off our backs while we investigate. We owe it to Diane."

Beaming, Tammy held up a suit bag that she had hung off the side of a computer. "I'm ready to go! There's a direct flight to the nearest airport at Spearfish, at 1330 hours this afternoon – I can book us on that." She cleared her throat. "Albert – why Buckhorn first, rather than Twin Peaks? That's where Diane Evans and Dale Cooper were last seen."

"Because if there was any way to follow where they went from Twin Peaks, Gordon would have followed it. We left Buckhorn too soon, and it's been itching at me ever since. Worse than misaligned Velcro on a bulletproof vest."

Tammy nodded. "But if we can't find anything there, we'll go on to Twin Peaks?"

"That’s what Denise suggested. But we've both been there – that place keeps its secrets. Buckhorn, though…we learned things there."

Once the flight was in the air, Albert called Dr Constance Talbot, the coroner in Buckhorn, with whom he had struck up a friendly relationship. He didn't think it was solely due to their shared profession, but that they genuinely understood each other's sense of humour, something he rarely encountered. 

Her phone went to voicemail, but that was no surprise for a coroner-slash-doctor-slash-forensic pathologist. 

"Constance, this is Albert Rosenfield. Agent Preston and I are on the way to South Dakota and would appreciate your assistance when we arrive."

His phone rang: it was Constance.

"Constance! That was fast."

"I wasn't in the lab – I was solving the problem of a patient with a giant fleshy lump attached."

"How did you solve it?"

"Well, the patient's in a sample jar going to the tick lab and the human I detached from it said thank you and left."

"Ha!"

"Actually, I'm surprised to hear from you. I've emailed the Bureau a dozen times and heard nothing. What's different now?"

"Constance, I haven't had any messages from you."

"Really? Then why are you on your way to Buckhorn?" she asked. 

"Unfinished business from our last visit."

There was a long pause before she spoke again. "So it's not about the invisible woman in the wall?"

"You're going to have to fill me in."

"Sure, soon as you get here."

They hired a car at Spearfish and drove the half hour to Buckhorn. Tammy drove while Albert emailed Denise about the missing communications. As they passed the town limits sign, on cue, Albert's phone rang. It was Gordon.

"Rosenfield."

"I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, ALBERT. I'M THE ONE WHO CALLED YOU."

"Yes, sir."

"I WANT YOU TO TURN AROUND RIGHT NOW AND RETURN TO WASHINGTON."

"No, sir," Albert replied.

"GOOD! I'LL SEE YOU TOMORROW MORNING." Gordon stopped. "WAIT, DID YOU SAY NO?"

"That's correct, sir. We're investigating missing Bureau employees on behalf of Chief Bryant. You'll have to take it up with her." 

"WELL THEN! I'LL DO THAT! LET ME WARN YOU ABOUT A THING, ALBERT."

Albert sighed. "What's that?"

"CAN YOU HEAR ME? YES? DON'T GO INTO ANY GAS STATIONS, AND DON'T ENTER ANY MYSTERIOUS DOORWAYS? WE CLEAR?"

"Crystal," Albert said, thinking of obsidian, and green jade. He'd been thinking about green jade a lot, recently, but he couldn't put his finger on why. Coop would have had a way to visualise it. 

"GOODBYE, ALBERT. AND TAMMY, WARN HER TOO."

"Will do."

Gordon terminated the call. 

"I'm guessing you heard all that?" Albert asked Tammy, who was steering them into the parking lot outside the police station. 

"I certainly did. Lucky this car's a hybrid: we probably won't have to gas it up at all."

Albert opened the car door. "Watch out for mysterious doorways, won't you?"

"I'll be on high alert."

Detective Macklay had walked briskly out of the station the moment they stopped. He appeared much happier than when Albert last saw him, because then he'd just been showered in the brains and blood from the exploded head of his former fishing partner. 

"Agents! I'm so pleased to see you. At least nobody's dead this time. Well, not definitely so."

"Not definitely dead? Is that a threat or a promise?" Albert asked with a grimace. 

Macklay laughed hesitantly, then stopped when nobody joined in. "Uh, okay, you want to follow me to the site? Doc Talbot's there already."

The site in question was on the outskirts of town, and Albert exchanged a glance with Tammy when it turned out to be a closed-down gas station. Police tape was wound around the perimeter of the property. The place was partially in ruins, white-painted cinder blocks piled up haphazardly like a snow bank. Constance appeared from the more intact side of the building, Geiger counter in her hand, and waved cheerfully.

"Should we be suiting up for the sake of our future children?" Albert asked her out the car window.

"Too late for me, do you think it works retroactively?" Constance hung the Geiger counter from her belt. "No, we're only marginally above background levels here. If you didn't get those emails, you want me to fill you in?"

"Please." 

"So, a week ago, some teenagers reported they'd heard a woman crying and screaming but they couldn't work out where. Since they'd been out here getting high, they waited a few days to tell anyone."

"Helpful, if there'd been someone trapped."

"Yeah, kids today, huh. Nothing to do with Detective Zero Tolerance here," she muttered, jerking a thumb at Macklay. 

"The doc here is still pissed at me for arresting her kid," he filled in. "Testing positive to pot is a felony here; they should be glad I'm willing to give them a caution and a night in the cells instead."

"I'm not here to debate state policy," Albert replied, keeping his voice level. "We may not have long to work on this case."

Constance nodded. "Yeah, I noticed you were flying commercial, and without the Deputy Director in tow. Bit of a comedown! So a couple of officers came to check out the report, and they could hear the woman's voice too. They searched the place – obviously that didn't take much time – and got worried that she was trapped underground in a hidden basement or in one of the old gas tanks. The place has been abandoned what, twenty-five years? The officers broke into the wall cavity, as you can see –" she gestured to the pile of cinder blocks, "- but no dice. Luckily Officer Hagen's brother owns a backhoe, so he came over and dug up the tanks, but nothing there either."

"So the woman's voice stopped?"

"Nope. Every forty-three minutes, it happens again. We've got eleven minutes to the next repeat. And there's no wall remaining for her to be hiding in."

Tammy popped the trunk and started hauling out their equipment. "Let's get this set up so we can record the event."

"I've got phone camera footage, and the Geiger counter's showing nothing, but that's all I've recorded so far," Constance said. "Here, I'll play what I recorded. They're all pretty much the same."

They clustered around her phone and she showed the video. Constance counted down on the video – "Three, two, one…" and then they heard the voice. It was definitely a woman's voice, making incoherent but distressing wails and a strange ticking, clicking noise, interspersed with the occasional hiss. Constance had filmed both sides of the demolished wall with her phone, but the source of the sound appeared to be the empty space where the wall would have been. After exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds, it cut off. 

"It doesn't always start in the same place." Constance played another recording. "But it's definitely on a loop of some kind. I'm not an audio expert, but it's not hard to pick out particular sequences that repeat."

"Send me the video?" Albert asked her, and continued to set up equipment: camera, camera with infrared, audio, EMF, motion detectors. When eleven minutes rolled around, they were ready. Constance got out her Geiger counter again, just in case. 

"Three, two, one…" and the voice started up again. 

It started with the clicking noise, then the wails, and Albert found he could predict when the hiss would come in. He couldn't see anything on the camera or motion detectors, but Tammy was monitoring the infrared camera and EMF detector, and her eyebrows were raised, a sure sign that something was happening, despite her otherwise calm demeanour.

After four minutes and thirteen seconds, it stopped as if a switch had been flicked. 

"All right, Preston, what have you got?"

"Minor fluctuations on infrared, but an extremely strong response from the EMF detector."

Macklay turned pale. "Ghosts?"

Both Albert and Constance scoffed simultaneously. 

"I've never detected a ghost, so I have no evidence for comparison," Tammy answered more diplomatically. "Similar readings were found in the vicinity of the so-called void where William Hastings died."

Macklay went even paler. "Look, I'd prefer ghosts to more exploding heads."

"Another possibility is that there's an electronic device being remotely triggered and that's where the voice is coming from."

"I searched thoroughly and found nothing," Constance said, shortly. 

"It could be quite small. I would like to remain on site and see if I can pinpoint the source of the EM disturbance in the next cycle."

Albert still felt fidgety, despite this distinct progress. "Good idea, Preston. Macklay, will you send some uniforms over to keep her company? If people disappear or heads start exploding, I want to know about it."

Macklay nodded. "Okay, but don't mention the heads exploding, okay? Everyone's a little jumpy after the headless bodies and bodiless heads."

Albert left the car with Tammy and caught a lift with Constance to the police station. 

"So, what's your take on this? I presume that if you took the trouble to contact the FBI you're fairly sure there's no recording devices involved."

"My take? My take is that sometimes shit gets weird, and what 'weird' means in scientific terms is that I don't have access to enough information." 

"Fair. I can't say that the information I have is going to bring sudden clarity, but in the spirit of interdepartmental co-operation: I have been warned by Director Cole to not enter gas stations; there is a missing woman who has at least once vanished without a trace and a missing man who has appeared as at three people and whom I once called friend; I personally observed some unusual phenomena at the location Hastings called 'the void'; and, finally, I trust the impartiality of Preston's observations." Albert took a deep breath. 

Constance grinned. "That's a mouthful, but all right. I've got another observation for you: the four relevant locations – Davenport's apartment where her head was found, Hastings' home where Phyllis Hastings died, the scene of the head explosion and the old gas station – form a cross, and the very centre of that cross is the police station."

"Fascinating, and possibly relevant. I have to ask: have you seen any dirty, bearded men in the area? They may be dressed in check shirts and overalls or jeans, and might carry axes or other tools."

"Dirty bearded men?" Constance asked. "No, I can't say I have, but we can check the CCTV at the station."

"A good idea. Both Director Cole and I saw them at the scene of Hastings' death, and in several other places afterwards."

Diane had been with them, then. Not real Diane, but the chain-smoking, stressed-out tulpa, simultaneously betraying them to the fake Cooper and trying to tell them what she could. 

Albert's phone rang: Gordon again.

"Rosenfield."

"I SEE THAT YOU HAVE NOT TAKEN MY RECOMMENDATIONS AND INDEED PROCEEDED STRAIGHT TO AN OLD GAS STATION."

"We didn't enter the gas station, Gordon. Can you tell me why you don't want us there?"

"I DON'T WANT YOU TO END UP LIKE PHILLIP JEFFRIES. IT'S A HARD THING FOR A MAN TO BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE, AND CAN ONLY END BADLY."

"Cooper was in at least two places at once."

"AND THAT'S NOT GOING WELL, IS IT?"

"You tell me, Gordon, you're the last person who saw him."

"COOPER WAS WELL-PREPARED AND IT MAY STILL HAVE GONE BADLY FOR HIM. WE KNEW THERE WOULD BE NO EVIDENCE IN THIS TIME."

"Then in which time?"

"THE PAST, OF COURSE! KEEP UP, ALBERT! THE GAS STATION IS BOTH A PORTAL AND A DEAD END. BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT YOU DO THERE."

Gordon hung up, and Alfred stared at his phone in some annoyance. 

"Is he always that cryptic?" Constance asked.

"Not always, no. Sometimes I think the more that people know, the less they're able to explain it."

"That'd cover a few medical professors of my acquaintance."

"Mine too. But it's damn frustrating when I'm trying to deal in truths, and I get partial truth and misdirection in return."

"The eternal complaint of those who deal largely with the dead, who are long past being able to lie to us." Constance sounded strangely sad. 

"And I'm looking for the missing, the most enigmatic of all." Albert thought Cooper would probably have liked that, but Albert certainly didn't. It was Coop who found people, Coop who formed relationship after relationship, each connection meaningful and important. He always came back to Albert, with or without his new lovers in tow, until the day he didn't. The only new genuine connection Albert had made, he thought, was with Tammy Preston, and Gordon and Denise had pushed that on him. Maybe Constance Talbot was a connection, too. He wasn't sure, yet. He was always more careful than Coop had been.

At the station, Constance fired up her computer and showed Albert the map of the four sites, lines converging on the station. 

"Zoom in, see if there's an exact spot inside the station." Albert appreciated her precise mapping. 

"Good idea. Here we go – it's the wall in the hallway leading down to the cellblock. Or maybe just inside Cell Three, if we go down a level."

"Anything special there?"

"Let's go have a look."

Right on the spot where the lines converged was the station's electrical switchboard, in a heavy metal cabinet. Constance went to get the key from the sergeant, and they swung it open. It appeared perfectly normal, fuses labelled with cracked and peeling Dymo tape, except that there was a heavy engine oil handprint on the inside of the door, as if someone had leaned heavily against it while the cabinet was open. The oil smelled faintly burned, but it was too thick and dirty to hold good fingerprints. While Constance locked up the switchboard again, Albert went down to the stairs to check out Cell Three. 

There was nobody in the cells today and it all smelled strongly of industrial-grade disinfectant: Albert approved. The doors weren't locked, so he ventured into Cell Three to see if there was anything unusual about it. Despite the recent and thorough cleaning, there were a number of small, oily scorch marks on the concrete floor of the cell, as if someone had been putting out cigarettes on the floor. Albert scraped at the biggest stain with a fingernail, but it didn't come up. Unusual for concrete to retain such marks at what had likely been relatively low temperatures, he thought. 

"Albert, you down there?" Constance called. 

"Yes. Was there ever a fire down here? Something that would have left an ashy residue?"

"I don't think so. They don't allow smoking down here, not since the 90s at least." She came down the stairs to examine the ashy marks. "That's weird – you'd think they would have come up. Christian the janitor, is very thorough."

"I can see that. It makes this stand out."

Upstairs the janitor in question, a heavily-built older man with a wispy grey beard, was mopping the hall. 

"Christian, can I ask you something about the cells?" Constance said.

"Sure thing, Doc."

"There's scorch marks on the floor of Cell Three. How long have they been there?"

Christian looked personally offended. "They won't come up!"

"How long have they been there?" she repeated.

"Since Principal Hastings was in the cells. He was in four, but the next morning when I came in, the day he passed away? Cell Three had the marks and I'm still working on it. My son found on the internet that Coca Cola can help, but I can't say it did. I've been cleaning this place since the days when you could smoke in the cells – hell, you could smoke anywhere – and I've never had so much trouble. They're kind of oily, too."

Constance and Albert glanced at each other. "The cells are monitored. Do you keep the footage?" Albert asked. 

"I think so. Let's go check it out."

Detective Macklay had returned to the station by then, and was happy to let them view the security tapes on Constance's computer. She checked on the last night of Hastings's life: he wasn't alone in the cells. There were two drunks there sleeping it off, but nobody in Cell Three. Zipping through at 10x speed, they watched Hastings and the drunks try to sleep on the narrow benches, flopping from side to side, getting up to urinate, going back to sleep. Hastings sat on the edge of his bed and cried with his face in his hands; on the video his broken rocking was jerky and weirdly hilarious. Albert smirked, and glanced over to see Constance with a similar uncomfortable expression, though her smirk was closer to bared teeth. 

"There!" she said, and Albert looked at the screen again, angry at himself for missing something. 

"Rewind it."

She did, and slowed it down. Cell Three was partially in shadow, but he soon saw what had caught Constance's eye: a brief flare of light. It was possible there was someone in the cell, sitting in the darkness; it was possible that the shadows happened to resemble a pair of legs hanging down from the bench. But the brief flares of light, as if someone was flicking matches from the bench to the floor, were undeniably there. Hastings, still sobbing, turned slowly to his right, towards Cell Three, then started talking to the shadow there. 

Albert found himself, not for the first time, wishing for Coop's exceptional lip-reading skills, but even he could pick a few words. "Who" and "why" were repeated, and possibly "Major", though Albert wasn't certain enough that he'd put it in an official report. It was impossible to tell if it was a conversation or a monologue, but Hastings moved slowly towards that side of his cell and the match flicking continued, erratic and at random moments. Finally, Hastings slammed his raised forearms against the bars that divided his cell from the next, and shouted loud enough to wake the drunks. Hastings turned his head to look at them as they complained, and when he glanced away from Cell Three the flares of light stopped. Hastings shrugged, and lay down on his bunk. 

"Nobody else saw what Hastings saw there," Constance muttered. "Annoying. But the cell door was open – there was nothing stopping someone walking in and out."

"Presuming they had a reason to be in the cells in the first place," Albert argued. "Even with your janitor's quality cleaning, you're not going to get much on AirBnB for those rooms."

"I'll check who was on duty that night." Constance checked the roster. "Nelson. He's young but he's reliable. He wouldn't be letting people wander in the station. I'll check with him in case something happened, but I'd be surprised."

Albert rested his head against the concrete wall for a moment. 

Constance put a hand on his shoulder. "You all right there?"

"No. My life's work has been discovering the truth – not great philosophical or scientific truths, just the quotidian variety – and the more I look at this picture the less sense it makes. Those matches? They're being flicked onto every conclusion I've ever made, burning up everything as if what I thought was reality is only images on old celluloid films."

Constance's voice was harsh. "We never get to understand why people do things, but we do get to know what they did. That's our role. If it helps someone in the process, that's a bonus."

Albert stood straight. "You're right. Of course, you're right. But sometimes you look out and see the vast size of the void all around you, and feel the futility."

"And then you realise you've gotten too philosophical, suck it up, and go back to work."

"That's what I'd usually say. But all the connections I've made in this world seem to be snapping free and sailing off into that void. Diane and Coop were my friends, Constance. I don't have a lot of those."

"You don't have none."

Albert nodded, turning around and taking Constance's hand. "Excellent use of the double negative. I appreciate it."

Detective Macklay stuck his head into the room. "Agent Preston's here. She says she's got something to show you."

Preston had set up her computer in the interview room and was fidgeting, moving from foot to foot as Albert had noticed she did when she had found something important. 

"Albert! While we were waiting the 43 minutes to record the next event, I talked to a friend in the crime lab, and she told me a few things to try with the data. When I sped it up and adjusted the pitch down, this is what I heard."

She pressed play, and the incoherent wail wasn't incoherent anymore.

"Linda." It was Diane's voice, perfectly clear. "Don't. Linda."

Tammy skipped to another portion of the recording. "Recognise him." A third. "Out."

Tammy looked at Albert, her eyebrows indicating concern even if the rest of her face was composed. "That's all I've had time to assemble, but I believe I can find more."

"Please do," Albert told her, and Constance subtly put a hand on the middle of his back in support. He found the human contact oddly encouraging. "Well done, Tammy. Any idea who 'Linda' might be?"

"None, I'm sorry."

"It's a good start. Set up a database search and see if you can find anyone by that name who have or had an association with Diane Evans or Dale Cooper. Or Gordon, or Phillip Jeffries." he added. 

"Setting it up," she replied, taking a seat behind her computer. 

"Thank you."

Macklay cleared his throat. "I guess you folks are going to be working in the station tonight? Motel across the road is cheap and clean, and you've got my number if you need it. I'll tell sergeant you'll be here."

"Night, Dave," Constance said.

"Night, Doc."

Albert was incredibly tired, so exhausted that he refused Constance's offer of dinner to sleep instead. Tammy was deeply absorbed in her digital reconstruction and internet spelunking, and waved off any suggestion that she might take a break. 

"I'm in the flow," she muttered, not even taking off her headphones.

"Flow, fine, got it." Albert retreated to the motel, took a shower with disappointingly low water pressure, and went to bed. 

He knew he was dreaming when he found himself sitting in a black armchair in a room with red curtains. Cooper had reported finding himself here several times. Across from him, in an identical chair, sat a spectacularly beautiful woman. She was blonde, in her forties, with huge, expressive blue eyes and an air of great sorrow. 

"My name," she said, in a strange, forced way, "Is Laura Palmer."

Albert realised she'd be about that age now if they ever did find a trace of her. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. He focused as hard as he could on making his voice work, no matter how the red curtains seemed to stifle all noise, even his own breathing, though he could feel that he was breathing. It was foolish to be relieved at that – it was only a dream – but he was, nonetheless. Laura's voice was the only sound. 

"You must help. Her."

"Diane." Albert managed to squeeze out a hoarse whisper. 

Laura tilted her head to one side. "She is. Not protected. Now." She paused for a moment, then tilted her head to the other side. "Linda is safe. Diane is. Afraid."

Albert tried to speak again, but he felt that his entire body was being pressed inwards under some huge force. His lungs were closing up and he couldn't breathe. He sternly reminded himself that he didn't need to breathe in a dream and, with tremendous effort, managed to lift the fingers of his left hand, stretching out towards Laura. Laura seemed unaffected by the massive pull of gravity and leaned forward, conspiratorial. "It's through the. Gas station."

Gazing a little way past Laura, Albert saw that there was an ornate, tremendously ugly side table next to her chair. On it sat a gold ring with a green stone and as soon as he saw it, Albert was able to move again. The sound of his palm scratching against the leather chair arm was incredibly loud, as if a whole room of people had simultaneously made the noise. The ring had a familiar symbol on it, the owl petroglyph from that cave in Twin Peaks, and Albert's ears rang with Laura's sudden scream.

He woke up, choking and retching, desperate for air. The light above him was flickering on and off and for a moment Albert thought there was somebody very tall standing over him. He rolled out of bed and grabbed his gun but by the time it was in his hand he had a clearer picture of the situation: he was alone. 

"So much for peaceful sleep," he told himself, more as an anchor to the waking world than from any need to communicate. He glanced at his watch to see it was 2:53 A.M. and he quickly took out a notepad and wrote down everything that he had seen in his dream, sketching the green ring and the ugly table. Unlike Cooper, he didn't believe that his mind was subconsciously providing him with solutions to his waking questions – otherwise med school would have been vastly easier – but he did acknowledge that many aspects of Blue Rose cases were beyond regular investigative methods. 

Logging into his files on the FBI server, Albert checked through his old case notes. He was sure there had been mentions of a jade ring, or a green ring, but none stood out. Frowning, he read through in more detail and found a very odd sentence that he himself had written.

"While rambling on about this 'Judy', Jeffries repeatedly mentioned a very important ." 

He tried searching for multiple spaces and found another, a report on an autopsy that he had not personally conducted. 

"Teresa Banks was known to wear a with a green stone however this was not found on her person or nearby."

A third, in Albert's own words again:

"Lucy Brennan stated that Agent Cooper placed a on the hand of his 'bad doppelganger' and then the doppelganger disappeared." 

That phrase he remembered typing, though with the word "ring" attached, in the strange, long day after Coop and Diane had reappeared, then vanished again in the shadows, along with Gordon. Only Gordon returned, and he claimed to have merely been in the basement of the Great Northern. 

Gordon. He might indeed be trying to protect Albert from whatever Phillip Jeffries' fate had been, but he was also keeping information from an active investigation. Albert picked up his phone, only to see that the battery was completely drained. With a curse, he plugged it into the charger and waited a slow ten minutes before it had enough charge to let him make a call.

He knew Gordon's home number, and that's what he dialled. 

"Hello?"

It was a woman's voice, lightly accented. Italian? Must be one of his many paramours.

"This is Albert Rosenfield. I need to speak to Gordon immediately."

"Oh, I will wake him."

"ALBERT?"

That was Gordon.

"Yes. You need to tell me where Cooper and Diane went. About Richard and Linda. And about the ring with the green stone."

Gordon did not sound impressed. "YOU WOKE ME FROM A VERY PLEASANT DREAM ABOUT MONICA BELLUCCI FOR THIS?"

"Gordon, I dreamed about the Lodge." Albert's voice was flat.

"OH, THAT'S DIFFERENT, THEN. WHO WAS THERE?"

"Laura Palmer."

"HOW OLD WAS SHE?" Gordon asked. 

"In her forties, I would guess."

"THAT'S A GOOD SIGN, ALBERT. YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE PLEASED THAT I DON'T KNOW AS MUCH AS YOU THINK I DO. COOP PLAYED THINGS CLOSE TO HIS CHEST, ESPECIALLY AT THE END THERE."

Albert was sure there was more to this. "Tell me."

"COOP AND DIANE WERE GOING TO FIX EVERYTHING. PUT THINGS RIGHT."

"Obviously, that didn't happen. The world is the same cesspool it's always been."

Gordon continued. "THEY KNEW HOW TO CROSS OVER, BUT I COULDN'T. THEY WERE MEANT TO COME BACK. IF YOU STAY TOO LONG YOU'LL HAVE A DOUBLE. PHILLIP JEFFRIES KILLED HIS DOUBLE AND NOW HE'S STUCK IN BETWEEN."

"Do you think Coop and Diane have doubles? Could that be this Richard and Linda?"

There was a strange noise on the other end of the phone and Albert realised, in some horror, that Gordon was crying. 

"SORRY, ALBERT. KEEP THIS BETWEEN US. COOP TOLD ME HIS PLAN WOULD WORK IF HE DIDN'T GET LOST, BUT I THINK THEY GOT LOST, ALBERT. I THINK THEY GOT LOST."

"Is there any way to find them again?" Albert asked.

"LOST IN THE WOODS LIKE LAURA."

"When she went missing?"

Gordon took a deep, shaky breath. "SHE WAS MURDERED, ALBERT. YOU AUTOPSIED HER WITH YOUR OWN HANDS."

Albert sat down on the bed, suddenly, two mutually incompatible memories surging through his mind. He remembered examining Ronette Pulaski before Cooper questioned her about her missing friend Laura. He remembered the autopsy on Laura's body – following up on Doctor Hayward and his buddy's local yokel job – but he couldn't have done that. Laura was never found. He remembered the letter under her dead fingernail that the doctors had missed and Cooper found. He remembered the photograph of her bloodless face, misted with water droplets, wrapped in plastic. He remembered Harry Truman punching him so that he fell across Laura's cold, water-logged body. 

"Gordon? What happened?"

Sounding more like himself again, he said, "YOU SPENT TOO LONG IN TWIN PEAKS, ALBERT, AND YOU WERE NOT PROTECTED. I WAS. COOP CHANGED THE PAST BUT THE ECHOES ARE CROOKED."

"What about Preston?"

"SHE ONLY WENT THERE ONCE. SHE KNOWS BUT DIDN'T EXPERIENCE THE TRUTH. SAME AS DIANE," Gordon said.

"And Denise, I'm guessing, since she didn't come to Twin Peaks when we were searching for Coop."

"I WISH SHE HADN'T SENT YOU AFTER THE TRUTH BUT I UNDERSTAND HER POINT OF VIEW. IF YOU GO BACK, YOU WON'T REMEMBER THE FIRST TIMELINE. YOU'RE BARELY HOLDING ONTO IT NOW."

Albert wondered if that's why Denise had sent him here. "So Buckhorn may actually be my best option for helping Diane. Unless – why are you protected, Gordon?"

"PHILLIP JEFFRIES. I DON'T KNOW WHY OR HOW, BUT HE'S GOT SOME INFLUENCE ACROSS THE WORLDS, STUCK WHERE HE IS."

"Where is that?"

"IN THE GAS STATION, ALBERT. WHERE I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO."

Albert's phone beeped then disconnected, completely out of charge despite being plugged in. He sat down on the edge of the motel bed, feeling like he'd been punched in the stomach by his closest friends. They had all known the truth of the doubled timeline and kept it from him. He'd thought it was odd that Tammy had been worried enough about him to go to Denise, but now he had the bigger picture: she knew his memory had been revised into the new timeline and was concerned about his functionality. And Denise, more distant from the actual events but still close to Coop, had sent him in blind. Keeping Albert in the dark hadn't just started since Cooper had changed the past, either – he remembered clearly the day Phillip Jeffries appeared in Gordon's office, even though he was supposed to be in Buenos Aires. Albert had even touched him. And yet as far as that investigation went, to his knowledge, was Jeffries' abandoned hotel room. 

He vividly remembered Jeffries pointing at Coop and shouting, “Who do you think that is there?” Lois Duffy in the original Blue Rose case, the copies of Diane Evans and Dale Cooper: it finally made sense. Gordon had never explained to Albert what had happened. Albert shook his head, distressed, the double load of memories weighing him down. That Jeffries had a double he'd already deduced, after the death of their Blue Rose contact in Colombia whom Albert had inadvertently exposed. But Gordon's claim that Jeffries had protected himself by killing the double? Was that what Coop did, too? And even Diane?

Albert took a deep breath, just as he had upon waking from his dream. He could feel himself trying to rationalise what his supposed friends and colleagues had kept from him – maybe it was too much to cope with, maybe they'd thought that a rationalist like Albert wouldn't believe them, maybe they needed someone to remember the revised timeline – but he punched the mattress hard and rejected all of that. They knew how much he cared about truth. They all knew that! He could ground the Blue Rose cases in forensic science – why not their own doubles and double memories?

He was very tempted to simply walk out the door. Take the car, drive to Spearfish, go home. He could do a lot of good in the world without remaining in the Blue Rose taskforce: the majority of the cases he had worked on hadn't had anything to do with that. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. How could Coop shut him out? That hurt more than Gordon's secrets, which had obviously pained him to keep; more than Tammy's insubordination, since she had to take her orders from Gordon; more than Denise's sneakiness, since she had at least genuinely meant to help. And the Diane he'd most recently known wasn't even Diane: it had been safer for her to avoided him for all those years. But Coop had left him alone without even reality to sustain him. Albert hadn't been chasing a ghost. He'd been chasing the ghost of a ghost.

He paced the room, two sets of memories shifting and overlapping in his mind like he was comparing two closely related DNA profiles on overlapping transparencies, the way he had done for many years before it was all computerised. Major parts were identical; others entirely different. The simile gave him a more solid grasp on what was happening, at least: other people might have literal doppelgangers, he only had doubled memories. Sibling memories, two different sets made from the same DNA. With that, he started to assimilate the information as he would from a crime scene. In his notebook, he drew a timeline and noted the major divergences as he would for two different witnesses to the same crime, then threw his pen down in disgust when he remembered that he'd developed that particular technique with Cooper. 

No, he thought, and picked up his pen again. Cooper might have lied and misled him, but Albert wasn't about to throw away his own instincts about people, especially for something as petty as his own hurt feelings. Coop was a fundamentally good person whose major flaw was assuming he knew best about things. If Cooper had endangered Diane and not Albert, it was because he thought that it was the best plan, not out of any distrust or scorn for Albert. Gordon had thought that Cooper had got lost along the way; Albert was not lost. If there was any hope for Diane – and any at all for Coop – Albert needed to keep his head in the game and his instinct for truth sharp, not blunted with disappointment and rejection. It was strange: he'd never been jealous of Coop's many other partners, not even Diane, but Cooper keeping the truth from him was turning him inside out with rage and resentment. And that wasn't Coop and it wasn't Albert.

He took a deep breath and kept writing until he was done. Dawn was beginning to lighten the fluorescent-tinted darkness outside, but it would still be an hour before dawn in Twin Peaks. The call he needed to make would have to wait. 

Instead, he got dressed, shaved, and headed down the main street to find breakfast for himself and Preston, to take to the station. It wasn't Double-R Diner level, but certainly adequate, and he presented himself to the station as a well-rested man ready for the day. 

Preston was at her computer, looking weary.

"Coffee time, Tammy."

"Oh, thank you, is it morning already?"

"You've worked right through. Bring me up to date then go get some sleep."

"Sure thing." She brightened up immediately at the chance to present research. "Okay, I've put together all the audio footage, and the spoken words are a 98 to 100% match to Diane Evans' voice. And there's a coherent message. The clicks are high-heeled footsteps, the hisses something solid scraping across a linoleum floor, perhaps a chair leg or a door. Here, I'll play it."

Albert inclined his head and she pressed play. 

"Linda, don't go in there. You won't recognise Richard now. Linda! Stay out!" 

"That's Diane. But it doesn't tell me who Richard is, or Linda."

"I didn't find anything conclusive in my search. Her duplicate, maybe?" Tammy cleared her throat. "Like Cooper's evil double?"

"Not necessarily evil, but it's possible. Go get some rest."

Preston yawned, and took a slug of her coffee anyway. "Thanks for breakfast. I'll head across to the motel. Keep me updated."

"Sure."

It would dawn in Twin Peaks, so Albert scrolled through his phone to a number he hadn't called in many years, not since the search for Cooper – or his evil double, as it turned out – had gone cold. 

"Hello?" said the hoarse voice at the other end. It was barely recognisable as Truman at all. 

"Sheriff Truman, this is Albert Rosenfield."

"I'm hoping this is good news, about Cooper?"

"No."

"Well, you sure haven't changed, Albert."

"Take it as a sign of respect. No pussyfooting. Tell me, what happened to Laura Palmer?"

"She went – was murdered. People say she went missing, but she was murdered. I don't know why I remember it. Or why I didn't for so long. Even my brother doesn't remember what happened. The only reason I can think of is that I've been in Seattle for a while, while they try different poisons on me, and it all slowly reset in my brain."

"Who does remember? I've only just come to remember it myself."

Harry coughed for a while, then spoke again. "Her mother remembers. Margaret Lanterman remembered, but she's gone now. Her log probably remembered, too."

"I thought the log only saw the future?" Albert had meant to sound sarcastic but it came out more gently than he expected.

"Ha, no, it saw all kinds of things. Ha. She called me and warned me, once. Cooper was coming to visit me, but he wasn't who he was. I didn't let him in."

"That Cooper is gone. There was a ring…"

"Yeah. Never put it on." Truman said. 

"Not intending to. Cooper took someone with him, a woman named Diane Evans."

Truman sounded more cheerful at that. "The famous Diane! I never got to meet her, myself. If they crossed over, you might not be able to get them back."

"I don't – can't – believe that Coop would leave Diane to be lost. Even if something went wrong, he would have wanted to protect her."

"The way he protected you? Or me?" Harry asked, his voice flat. 

"Ignorance was a poor protection."

"It wasn't none," Harry's double negative reminded Albert of Constance.

He blinked hard, the double vision of his memories flickering through his mind. 

"Truman, I need to find Diane. Recall when Coop found Annie Blackburn, before he went missing. What happened? Where did they go?"

Harry sighed, a long and raspy sound. "There's places where it's easy to travel elsewhere. The ring can take you there too, but you don't want to go that way. You won't come back. There's a…a gate, I guess, in a grove near Twin Peaks, with a pool of, well, it smells like burned engine oil." 

"Engine oil, huh?" Albert wrote that down, remembering the stains on the floor of Cell Three, and the weird, dirty men who clustered around the void Gordon had nearly entered. Twin Peaks – Grove – Engine Oil, he noted. 

"There's another in the woods, near the old Air Force listening post. Bobby Briggs knew about it and Andy Brennan passed through it. It's where he found the eyeless girl who became Diane."

"Andy? That idiot?" Albert wrote down Twin Peaks – Listening Post – No Brain. 

"Enough, Albert." Harry paused, and Albert waited. "There's others. Plenty of them. But they all have different conditions for entry. If Coop wanted you there, I'm sure he would have left you directions to the key."

"Thanks, Truman. And…I don't often say this, but good luck."

"I appreciate it."

Albert sat looking at his phone for a few moments and thought about what Constance had said: when shit got weird, it meant that she didn't have enough information. An intelligent person from a hundred years ago wouldn't understand the technology Albert was holding in his hand, but given an explanation, they could work it out. He found it a difficult mental leap to extrapolate this to his current situation – revised timelines, alternate dimensions, gateways – but that didn't mean it was impossible. It only meant that he had been thrust forward into a scientific paradigm a hundred years past his understanding. Tammy had been able to turn a mysterious wailing noise into coherent speech. Albert could turn lies and misdirection into a plan. 

He sat at the computer and downloaded the recording of Diane's – or Linda's – voice to his phone. He hijacked the station's printer to print out name tags with his name, Diane's name, and, perhaps with too much optimism, something of which Albert was rarely accused, another reading "Dale Cooper". He collected them from the office area behind the young desk sergeant. 

"Anyone in the cells right now?" he asked the sergeant.

"No, sir. Uh, could I have the switchboard key from Doc Talbot?"

"Not yet," Albert told him and moved on. Constance should be here shortly – he could trust her curiosity to bring her – and then he'd be ready. 

Down in the cells, he winced as he used his beautifully sharpened autopsy chisel – meant for bone – on the rough concrete floor. 

"You tunnelling to another dimension, there?" Constance asked from behind him. "You've got poor Nelson at the desk all worked up."

"Nope. I'm digging up a sample of the marks on the floor. I hope they'll be enough to get me where I need to go, but if not – is there a gas chromatography mass spectrometer around here somewhere?"

"The high school chem lab has a basic one, sure. They'll let me use it if I ask nicely," Constance said.

"Good. If the substance I'm digging up here is something needed in quantity, I might need to analyse and recreate it."

"What do you think it does?"

Albert steeled himself and said it out loud. "Allows people to travel elsewhere, apparently. If Buckhorn is a place where it's easy to do, I think you've already identified the exact locations. Now we have to work out how to utilise this information."

Constance sat on the cell bench. "It sounds crazy, but sure. No crazier than anything else that's happened."

Albert looked up at her from his position on the floor. "Exactly. We have the facts and, even if they seem crazy, they're still facts. Much easier to work with than trying to shove what we don't understand into the framework of what we do."

"So, how are you going to 'utilise this information', as you put it?"

"I'm going to go to where Diane is and bring her back. She may be lost, or it may be part of Cooper's plan, but she can tell me which."

Albert bagged the chip of blackened concrete that he had chiselled free and Constance helped him up off the floor. 

"So, Albert, what next?"

"I'm going upstairs, but I'm going to need the key to the switchboard."

"Here."

"I'll put a number into your phone. It's Gordon Cole's personal number. If I don't return in 72 hours, I want you to call it. If he checks up earlier than that, you're free to tell him where I am," Albert told her.

"Do you really think you're going to go somewhere?"

"'Really think' is overstating it. I believe it's possible that I will go somewhere. Or sometime, or become someone. It's hard to say which, if any."

"And if you don't?" Constance's expression was becoming more and more concerned, and Albert couldn't blame her for that. If it were him listening to this, he'd be questioning his own sanity too.

"Then I haven't got the details correct and I'll take you up on the offer of the high school mass spectrometer."

Upstairs, Albert double checked that he had everything he needed, and inserted the key into the switchboard. He placed his hand on the black, greasy handprint: his hand fitted the silhouette precisely. Nothing happened for a long moment, and he heard Constance shifting uncomfortably. Then he remembered the addled testimony of Jerry Horne, of his nephew Richard Horne struck by lightning; and the medical report of electrocuted Dougie Jones waking up as Dale Cooper. Of course: he was dealing with an electrical switchboard. What he needed to was to complete the circuit. He fumbled open the zip lock bag with the sample of dirty concrete, and the moment his bare skin touched it, he was elsewhere. 

He was lying on his back, in the early evening. It wasn't the zigzag room Cooper had described, nor a grove of trees, but a dry ditch by a narrow dirt road, shaded by trees in late afternoon light. He wasn't sure where, though the abundance of pine trees would tend to indicate the Pacific North West. He was wearing the same suit as before, but his socks and shoes were missing. A quick check ascertained that he had his gun and printed labels in his pockets, but not the concrete chip or the bag it had been in. His phone was present but the battery fully discharged; he checked his reflection in the screen to make sure he was still himself. He seemed to be, but who knew what sense of self an evil doppelganger might have? Leave that one to the psychologists. It was a warm evening and he could distantly hear traffic, so he must not be too far into whatever forest this was. Getting up, Albert started to walk towards the sound, placing his bare feet carefully to avoid stone and twigs. He had a vague memory of Coop trying to convince him that Paul McCartney's bare feet on the Abbey Road album cover indicated that he was dead, but they'd been drunk at the time, so Albert had no idea whether this was a genuine symbol or something Coop had made up. Either way, he was able to think and move, so he'd take that as a reasonable sign of life. 

As he got closer to the road, the traffic noises were louder and louder. He revised the size of the road upwards to a small highway. If he was in the mountains near the town of Twin Peaks, the tree cover meant that he couldn't see either of the mountains from which it drew its name, though the hilly terrain matched. The gentle downward slope he was following suddenly became steeper and there was more shale. Albert found a large stick and used it to keep his balance. He had the distinct feeling that someone was watching him – an annoying feeling that fell too far onto the instinct side of rationality for Albert – but he couldn't draw his gun and hold onto the stick simultaneously, so left it holstered. The shale hurt his bare feet, but he continued to hobble and slide down the hill towards the traffic noises. 

Up one last ridge and Albert would be able to see the road. He was close enough that he could distinguish different the sounds of vehicles, trucks and cars and the occasional motorbike, but when he scrambled to the top of the ridge the road was narrow and empty, completely silent but for an owl hooting in the dusk. He shook his head. It was not uncommon for people to misjudge the distance and direction of sounds in unfamiliar terrain, but Albert had practice analysing such things, and it was highly disorienting to realise that his senses were unreliable here, wherever that was. It was a sharp reminder that, wherever he was, his perceptions could be drastically altered. Well, he'd rather think that than assume it was the laws of physics that had changed, and without objective tools to measure, he may as well assume the less disturbing of the options. 

The road was a single lane each way but well paved – probably a country road. It had to be headed somewhere, then, whichever way he walked. Around the first corner there was a turnoff down a smaller road, and it was marked with an old-fashioned wooden signpost with two arms. The longer arm pointed to Twin Peaks, 14 miles, and the other to Pearl Lakes, 9 miles. Albert quickly compared this to the US Geological Survey maps that he had long since memorised, and could more exactly determine his location. He was on the lower reaches of Blue Pine Mountain, on the eastern side facing Ghostwood National Forest, and if he continued down his current path he would pass by the Ghostwood Correctional Facility and reach the north-eastern edge of Twin Peaks in just a few hours. He must not be far from the location Truman had mentioned, near the Air Force listening post, though he had no way of searching for it. Now that he thought about it, Major Briggs had disappeared from there, only to reappear in Buckhorn twenty-five years later. Not a fate Albert wanted for himself. Especially the decapitation.

A gibbous moon hung in the sky, small and cold, but the night was warm enough and, apart from his sore feet, Albert walked with confidence towards Twin Peaks. Gordon's warning about not staying here or he might leave with a double fitted what he understood about Agent Cooper's experiences, but he didn't know if it applied to the tulpa of Diane Evans. Had she stayed there too long, or was it a more deliberate act? Was the tulpa something separate, and Linda was the duplicate? He tried to remain alert and present as he walked, but his concern for Diane and for Coop was a constant distraction. Not being fond of the great outdoors in general, it took him a while to realise how quiet the woods were without the false traffic noise – not the quiet of the wilderness, which should be teeming with birds and animals, but the silence of an artificial environment. He could hear his own breathing and footsteps, the clunk of his stick on the edge of the road, but apart from the occasional owl, nothing else at all. It felt as if he was a specimen in a controlled environment. Maybe he was. 

"Fuck!" Albert was suddenly cast from his contemplative state by a stubbed toe. He pressed it against his other foot to try to dull the pain, but his toenail was bleeding bright red and the pain was equally sharp. He went through his pockets in case he had something to use as a bandage, and when he looked up again he could see a small gas station, partially visible at the next corner. Albert had been looking in that direction when he injured himself, and he had not seen it there.

He limped towards it, trying to keep his bleeding toe off the ground, and as he passed under the electrical wires they gave a strange buzz that echoed in Albert's fillings. He slowed down: Diane's tulpa had told him that not-Cooper had taken her to a gas station; Gordon had called it a portal and a dead end; Laura in his dream had told him that Linda or Diane was through the gas station. He needed to investigate it. 

It was a derelict and dirty place, a good few decades older than the decommissioned gas station in Buckhorn. The gas pumps out the front were so covered in dirt and dust that they were sepia-toned, looking like something out of an old National Geographic feature. Even the words "Convenience Store" were so dirty as to be barely visible. The windows were lit up in the building behind the pumps with a dull orange glow, though he couldn't smell or hear any signs of fire. Albert glanced upwards and saw the moon was the same colour, the nightmare shade it appeared during wildfires. He put down his improvised walking stick and drew his gun. The door had once had glass in it but that was missing and instead had boards nailed to it, covering the gaps. He edged slowly forward, towards the battered wooden door, on high alert. The door creaked open as he approached. 

Three red diamonds were painted on the door, and the paint seemed fresh, small drops still trailing their way down the rough boards. The bright red was the same colour as the fresh blood of his toenail. He knew perfectly well that blood oxidised quickly: something painted with blood would be rusty brown, not red. Nonetheless, he decided not to touch the alleged paint and disprove his own theory. If it was blood, or supposed to be, it was meant to intimidate him, and it did not. He eased around the door frame, weapon at the ready, but the room was empty except for a long wooden table. Cockroaches skittered across the floor as he approached the table and Albert was almost relieved to have some sign of life in here. 

The strange buzz of electricity came again despite a lack of any apparent light source and a huge, rough hand wrapped across his face, covering his eyes and mouth in a single grab. Albert's FBI training let him respond immediately and he kicked backwards at his attacker's knee, but his foot found only empty air. He took the logical next step – if the attacker was incorporeal, his grip certainly wasn't – and bent the man's little finger back until he heard a snap and a raspy scream. Twisting free, Albert put the long table between himself and the man, and drew his weapon. He had seen this kind of man before, waiting on the staircase of the Buckhorn vortex for Gordon, and creeping about nearby. Up close, the man was a good eight inches taller than Albert and fully encrusted with dirt and oil, from his knit hat to his straggly beard and bare hands and feet. Even the wrench hanging from his belt was a disgusting slimy black. His eyes and remaining teeth were stark white, and he bared those teeth in a hideous grimace. 

"Welcome," he growled, then opened his hand to reveal a lit match. It stunk of sulphur far beyond any match Albert had ever smelled. He covered his mouth and nose with his free hand and waited for the nausea to settle. 

"I'm looking for Diane Evans," he told the man, keeping his voice steady. 

"Which one? She went up in smoke. Ka-boom!" 

"Not that one." He thought for a moment. "And not Linda, either."

"Ahhhhhhhh." He exhaled slowly, sputum gurgling in his throat. "You should go upstairs." He shuffled over to the door through which Albert had entered, and opened it. "Hurry up. Unless you want to double double."

"No, thank you," Albert told him, and cautiously walked towards the door, but the oil-covered man didn't try to grab him again. Albert walked to the side of the building, where a flight of rickety wooden stairs stood, leading up to the roof. He peered at the road, which should be less than thirty feet away, but it was invisible in thick, slightly yellow fog. Even as he ascended the rickety stairs she couldn't see past the gas pumps, as if the whole building had floated away in its own polluted cloud. 

The stairs didn't lead to the roof as it had seemed from the ground, but to a metal door. When Albert touched the handle it was brutally cold. He snatched his fingers away and tried again, using his jacket sleeve as a barrier. 

The room inside wasn't cold at all. It was suffocatingly warm, as dirty and plain as the gas station below, and it looked as though a meal had been interrupted: there were mismatched and broken chairs surrounding a Formica table, and assorted bowls abandoned half-eaten, spoons sticking out. When he moved closer, Albert could see that all the bowls contained creamed corn, with fragments of teeth and bones sticking up above the surface. The food smelled acrid and each bowl had an oily sheen on the top. There was a ragged sofa opposite the three large windows, which were partially covered with newspaper. Light was creeping in through the layers of dirt, even though when Albert had entered it had been night. He holstered his gun: it didn't seem that anyone was here right now.

He made his way to the windows to look out. The newspapers were faded and oil-smeared, and those that Albert could make out at all were dated 1956 or 1989. One had a large picture of a white horse, but he couldn't read the caption or any of the accompanying article. Peering out through a gap, he tried to make out any detail of his surroundings, and the light grew suddenly brighter, then so bright that he was knocked backwards, covering his eyes and gasping for breath. When he could see again, the metal door had vanished, along with the bowls of creamed corn. There was an elderly woman seated on the sofa, a plastic bowl of creamed corn on her lap and an oversized plastic spoon in her hand. 

"Ma'am? I'm Agent Rosenfield with the FBI."

"I requested no creamed corn!" the old woman muttered, crankily. "They never listen."

"Who never listens?" Albert edged closer. 

"Meals on Wheels! I'm filled to the brim with creamed corn! I don't need any more. To the brim!" 

As she spoke, a small amount of creamed corn leaked from the corners of her mouth. She sat there for a moment, corn sliding down her face, then quickly licked it up, her tongue surprisingly long and narrow.

"Would you like me to take it away?" 

"No, it's mine! If you wanted some, you should have spoken up earlier."

"I wasn't here earlier," Albert replied, keeping his voice level and patient. 

The old woman was seated at the table, though he hadn't seen her move, the creamed corn still in front of her. "Yes, you were. After you went to the motel."

"Which motel? The motel in Buckhorn?" 

The old woman startled, then shook her head. "Oh, it's all Laura's fault! She's trying to make all the boundaries real. She doesn't understand how time works, not really. But at least she never brought me creamed corn."

The light grew bright again and Albert covered his eyes. It stayed bright, so he eventually lowered his arm, blinking. He was standing outside a cheap motel, a two-storey brick and concrete building somewhere in a desert. The light was the afternoon sun, beating down on the parched earth and the cracked concrete. The blood around his toenail had dried, finally, but his shoes hadn't magically re-appeared so the ground was starting to burn the soles of his feet. Albert hurried over to the shade of canopy over the motel entrance for some respite. His phone was stone dead, but maybe the office would let him call. Once in the shade he realised that this place was wrong, too: he could hear the crackle of electricity from the overhead wires, and distant traffic, but no natural sounds whatsoever: no wind, no birds, no barking dogs. He must still be in the controlled environment, another rat in the maze. 

Someone was standing quietly in the shade right beside him. It was the eyeless Asian woman, dressed in Lucy Brennan's pink robe, although last Albert had seen of that garment, it had been worn by Diane Evans as she left with Cooper and Gordon. 

"Where have you been?" he asked her. "Is Diane still in there?"

She tilted her head, listening to him, but didn't reply. 

"I need to make a phone call. Do you need help?"

Again, she remained silent, but placed a pale hand on his arm. He noticed how dirty his suit was, covered in dust from the ditch he'd fallen into, yellow marks from the fog around the gas station, and smears of black oil where the man in the hat had grabbed him. The woman's fluffy robe and soft pyjamas were clean, and even her fuzzy hot pink slippers showed no trace of the gritty dirt in which they were standing. Albert held the motel's glass front door open – it read "Pearblossom Motel" in faded lettering – and she led them in.

The room was rotated ninety degrees from what he had expected, and he stopped suddenly, the busy pattern on the linoleum disorienting him. The eyeless woman stopped with him, her hand remaining on his arm as if he was escorting her to a dance. She had the same French polish that he had noticed on Denise. Nobody else was here, and although there was a sign declaring, "Ring bell for service", there was no bell. 

The motel desk was covered in green Formica, cracked and peeling at the edges, and Albert could see a phone sitting on the other side. It was an old-fashioned dial phone, the kind he'd grown up with, so he reached over the desk and picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone, so he tried dialling 0 – no – then 9, and there it was. 

"You want me to call someone for you?" he asked the eyeless woman, but she didn't respond, her head tilted to the side as if she was listening very intently to something soft and far away. 

Albert had no idea if anyone this phone could reach would be their real selves, or a copy, or if he himself was a copy, but he also couldn't not try. He dialled Gordon's home number, but even after he finished, the dial kept spinning on to new numbers by itself. He tried to follow the sequence but it was far too fast – he could smell the heated plastic of the phone – and it wasn't even dialling complete number, often stopping in between two, and not returning all the way before it spun again. A pink cloud floated out of the mouthpiece and Albert held it away from his face. The eyeless woman was making gentle chirping noises, close enough to being syntax for them to catch at Albert's hearing, but he couldn't understand what she was saying. 

The cloud extended further and further from the phone, spinning and expanding at a slow and inevitable pace, like a film of an explosion slowed down. It was gently sinking to the floor, heavier than air, and Albert put the phone's receiver on the floor to let it extrude until it was done. 

"What is this?" he asked the woman. She seemed to understand him, as she pointed at it and chirped emphatically, but he didn't comprehend. 

Eventually, the cloud tapered off and shuddered several times, until it became Diane, lying on her side on the floor. Her hair was a soft pink, exactly the shade of the dressing gown the eyeless woman wore, but she was wearing a black t-shirt and pale pink skirt, nothing that Albert had seen her in before. The memory of the tulpa folding into nothing hit him again and he took an involuntary step backwards, remembering the anguish on Diane's face as she screamed "I'm not who I am!" She had warned them before they killed her, and he still didn't know what to make of that.

"I am…who I am," the Diane on the floor murmured, and the eyeless woman let go of Albert's arm to run to her side and softly touch her face, silent again. 

"Diane?" Albert asked, not willing to move closer. 

"Albert? What are you doing here? How did you cross over?"

"Through the gas station."

"What year is this?"

"It was 2017 when I last looked." Albert stared about reception. There was no indication that it wasn't the 1980s in here, perhaps earlier. There were no calendars to assist him. "I don't know if it is here."

"That's okay, I think we're here at the right time. I have to go outside. Give her a chance."

"Give who a chance?"

Diane got up quickly, brushing off the eyeless woman's attempt to assist her, and walked out the front door. It was night, now, though it should have been less than an hour since Albert took shelter from the harsh afternoon sun. The ground remained hot from the day, but no longer unbearably so. 

A car, an old Ford of 1960s vintage, pulled up and Agent Cooper got out of it. He was dressed just as he had been when Albert had last, briefly, seen him in Twin Peaks. Albert reached out a hand towards him, but he seemed not to see the three people under the motel entrance canopy. He walked briskly past them towards the motel lobby. 

The eyeless woman's chirping became loud and distressed, and Cooper slowly turned his head in her direction, looking straight through Albert.

"Coop?" Albert asked, the nickname catching in his dry throat. This wasn't the weather-beaten, long-haired man from the prison, but nor did he have the confident air of the Cooper Albert had last seen at 2:53 in the sheriff's department in Twin Peaks. Instead, he looked sad and stressed, his suit crumpled and slightly dusty. 

This Cooper didn't seem to hear Albert, and instead shook his head and turned away from Albert and the eyeless woman. Diane had already moved away from them, standing near a brick pillar at the far end of the canopy. 

"Coop!" Albert said again, and reached out to touch his arm. Nothing happened: he didn't touch him, but he didn't go through him either. They simply overlapped for a moment, then Cooper absently brushed dust off his sleeve, right where Albert's hand had been, and walked into the motel. 

"Why can I talk to you but not to him?" Albert shouted at Diane. "What's wrong?"

"With you? Nothing. You haven't been here very long yet. He's been here for a very, very long time and so has she." She pointed at the parked car, and Albert saw another Diane sitting in it, her hair dark pink but otherwise dressed identically to the Diane beside him. 

"Now, she has to choose now," Diane whispered to Albert and stepped to the side of a pillar to where the other Diane would be able to see her, staring over at the parked car. Albert rubbed his sore, dry eyes and followed Diane's gaze. The Diane in the car was as tired and drawn as the Cooper who had just walked past them, but, unlike him, her eyes focused on the apparition before her. 

The Diane by Albert called out, her voice gentle but piercing in the silence of the desert. "Linda, don't go in there. You won't recognise Richard now. Linda! Stay out!" She took a step forward, her heels clicking on the hard-packed dirt, as the motel door swung closed behind Cooper, scraping against the linoleum floor. It was the sequence Albert had heard at the gas station. This motel, like Buckhorn and Twin Peaks, must be one of those places where it was easy for people – and sound, apparently – to travel from one place to another. 

For a moment, it looked as if the Diane in the car was going to stand up, but instead she slumped back in her seat. 

"Is she all right?" Albert asked. "Is she the tulpa? Are you?

"Soon she'll be Linda," Diane replied. "She's been here too long. And the tulpa is gone, poor thing."

"What about you?" 

Diane stared into the distance. "I tried to help. I thought I was doing the right thing. But Coop was in there so long, the same as poor Laura. It's all up to him. I can't help him!"

"Where were you?"

She turned, very slowly, and finally seemed to recognise the eyeless woman standing just two feet away from her. Diane reached out to touch the woman's arm. "She protected me. We lived in the stars and the sea. Like nested dolls."

The woman stroked Diane's hand tenderly. "Chrysalis," she chirped and Albert suddenly realised he had understood that.

"It's hard to be a chrysalis, but it's not great being the caterpillar, either," Diane told Albert, turning away from the Diane in the car. Cooper walked out of the lobby with a key dangling from his fist, passing through Albert's body again. 

"Coop!" Albert shouted again, to no avail. He stretched out his arms, keeping Cooper enclosed in his own body for one last moment, and then they were separate again, on different planes as they had been for the last twenty-five years. 

Diane slapped his hand down. "Don't distract him! He's got to stay under the radar. Diane's almost lost. She couldn't hear me."

The other Diane got out of the car, stiffly, as if they had travelled a long way, and followed Cooper into a motel room. The light above the door flickered, then stayed on, a harsh orange light in the blue-toned dark of the desert. 

"Can't we save them? What's so important that we can't help them?" Albert shouted at Diane, his voice cracking.

She slapped his face. "Shut up! He chose this path, and he chose to leave you behind. Nobody asked you to come here!"

He reeled from the slap, then stood his ground. He lowered his voice, but didn't stop talking. "I couldn't leave him. Or you. Whatever this greater good is, why did you have to shut me out? For twenty-five years?"

Diane took his hands in hers. There were no nicotine stains on her fingers, as there had been on the tulpa's. "It wasn't meant to be – he didn't know it was going to take this long. And after the doppelganger came for me, the only place I could be safe was with Naido." She smiled at the eyeless woman, who turned her head towards Diane at the mention of what must be her name. "I couldn't tell you. Anyone. I don't understand all of it. Even Gordon doesn't, and he's protected."

Albert sighed. "I didn't ask for protection. You let me live inside a lie."

"Laura!" Naido chirped.

"Yes, a lie about Laura."

"No, no," Diane argued. "That's new. That's only just happened, in the woods. Didn't you hear the owls?"

"I heard them. But it happened in 1989."

"Yes, and changed just a few hours ago. Laura was murdered the first time around." She put a hand on Albert's chest. "Remember when we drank at Max Von's, on the fourth of July, after Coop went missing? And we went home together and all we did was talk about him and listen to the fireworks? That was still me, then. And Laura had been murdered. Coop said he needs her alive." She shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know why. He didn't seem happy about it."

Diane's hand was cool on his chest, in the warm desert air. He looked down at it and realised she was wearing the jade ring of his dream. "Diane, I – I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. Or the other you."

She glanced involuntarily towards the hotel room where Cooper was, along with another of herself, and bit her lip. 

"Diane? Should we stop them?"

Her fist curled, crumpling Albert's shirt. "No. No, she made a free choice, even if it led her to a bad place. She's becoming Linda. We knew it was a risk." She uncurled her clenched first, with an obvious effort, and threw her arms around Albert instead. He stood stock still for a moment, shocked at the unaccustomed feeling of her body pressed against his, then slowly completed the embrace, his arms embracing her, too. 

Diane cried on his shoulder, her make-up running down her face. "Albert, it's all I can do to respect his choice. I want to protect him but I know it's the wrong thing."

"Is this some kind of simulation? A lab test?" Albert asked, holding Diane close.

"Maybe. But he thinks he can escape it."

He spoke right into her ear, barely breathing the words. "Who's watching?"

"Jeffries told you her name – don't say it! Don't say it."

Albert managed not to say "Judy", or "Joudy" or however Jeffries meant it. "Did she create this place?"

Diane shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I don't know if this place is real or sideways to reality, or completely fabricated."

"You should take off that ring. I spoke to Harry Truman – he says it leads you to bad places."

"I don't have a –" Diane stared at her own hand, dazed. "An engagement ring. Who gave me this? It's supposed to get me out of here, but who gave me this? How do I know that? Coop didn't give me this!"

"Take it off."

Diane glanced upwards, as if checking for someone observing them, and slid the ring off her finger. She held it out to Naido, who shrunk away from it. 

Albert took it from her. The ring was extremely heavy, heavy enough that it was hard to move, but he had overcome gravity in his dream and could do it again. He determinedly held on long enough to stagger over to the sand by the parking lot. Diane and Naido followed him, Diane silent and Naido making sounds of alarm, putting herself between Diane and the ring. Looking carefully in the strange orange light, he found a disturbance that, in the regular world, would indicate an ant's nest, though he could see no trail of desert ants here, nothing living apart from the few humans who had wandered into this closed-off world. He dug a small hole in the warm sand and put the ring in it, carefully covering it over again. The moment he let go, Naido sighed in what sounded like relief. 

"Let the ants take care of it. If it takes them to where that doppelganger of Coop's went, well, he deserves an infestation."

Diane helped him up to his feet, and briskly brushed the sand off him, though he felt vastly lighter without the ring in his hand. She clung close to him again, and Albert was strangely relieved that she did.

"Albert, without the ring I don't know how to get out of here. Or even if we can, since I'm not protected inside Naido anymore."

"I have several sets of co-ordinates to portals," Albert told her. "They're not in the desert, though – they're in Buckhorn, South Dakota, or near Twin Peaks. Do those places even exist here?" He stared out into the night, uncertain if there was a world out there beyond the Pearblossom Motel. The darkness seemed complete and there were no stars; maybe the yellow smog that clung to the gas station in the woods had blotted them out. 

The motel room door opened and Diane with darker pink hair stumbled out. Her face was tear-stained and her make-up disarrayed, just the Diane in Albert's arms. 

"If I call out, will she hear me?" Albert asked Diane, who only shrugged again, slumping as if seeing the other Diane was draining her of energy. 

"Diane!" he called, then, "Linda!" 

She turned, briefly, then shook her head and walked away into the desert night. Naido chirped a sound of alarm and ran after her, the pale pink of her dressing gown an exact match to Linda's skirt. Naido caught up with her quickly, and took her hand. She smiled at Naido through her obvious distress, and hugged her. One moment they were perfectly visible, and the next moment they were entirely swallowed by the darkness. Albert thought that he saw a faint flash of purple light lifting upwards from the ground, but it might have just been the afterimage of Naido's pale clothing. 

"She's gone!" Diane cried out, collapsing against Albert. "She's gone! She's me and she's gone!" 

Albert heaved her upwards, making her stand without his support, though he didn't break contact. He had the strange idea that if he did he would lose touch with gravity, flying away from the ground at the speed of the earth's rotation. 

"Diane! Snap out of it! We might be stuck in this fucked-up experiment, and Coop might have lost his way like Jeffries, but we know who we are. We are who we are."

"That's why we're lost!" Diane cried out. "What he did to me –"

"To you!" Albert shouted back. "To you, Diane Evans! He hurt you and he abandoned me, but we are still who we are. Yes, it matters what happened – everything matters! But we can choose how we act on that. We can choose what we build on those foundations." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the name tags he had printed, and folded the edge over so he could tuck his into his jacket's breast pocket. 

"A name tag?" Diane asked, her attention caught. 

"Here's yours. If we're samples in some goddamn lab, I'm labelling myself properly. I don't want to get lost. I don't want to forget who I am." He gave her DIANE EVANS. She took it, without argument, and folded it onto the v-neck of her black t-shirt. It sat askew, but her identity was clear. She had stopped crying, though there was mascara on her fingers and smeared on the nametag. 

She touched her name, then Albert's. "We are who we are. Okay."

"And Coop?" Albert's gaze was magnetically drawn towards the motel room, but he hadn't moved any closer. He still held the third name tag, DALE COOPER, in his hand.

"You brought one for him?" For the first time in this horrible place, Diane smiled. "You old romantic."

Albert looked away, but he didn't let go of Coop's name tag. "I'm going to leave it for him. If it can protect him at all – if it doesn't interfere with whatever this plan is – then he can take it. And if it's too late, or if he needs to be this Richard guy, then I guess he can ignore it." 

The two of them walked, arm-in-arm, over to the motel room, and Albert shoved the name tag under the door. He couldn't hear anyone in the room and only the static of a TV interrupted the complete silence.

The older car that Cooper and Diane had arrived in had moved to another spot while Albert wasn't looking, and a modern car, maybe ten years old or so, was in its place outside room seven. 

Diane pointed to the older car. "I think that's our ride." The car was making the same buzzing, crackling noise as the gas station.

"Okay." They approached the passenger side and, without breaking contact with Albert, Diane got in and slid over to the driver's seat. Albert sat in the passenger seat and moved his hand down to Diane's hip to leave her free to drive. 

"The keys are here," she said, and started the engine. It sputtered and the whole car jerked, but it started and then they were in daylight. 

"Where the fuck –" Albert started to say, then caught himself. He knew exactly where they were. "We're in Buckhorn, at the gas station."

The car's engine groaned and died; when Albert turned his head slightly he realised that the back seat was full of white-painted cinder blocks, as if their car had materialised inside the demolished wall. The car itself was much older, falling to pieces around them. 

"Where is this place?" Diane sounded alarmed. "I've never been here."

"No, you haven't. Your tulpa did. This is where we found the body of Major Briggs, and a portal to the gas station. We heard your – Linda's voice here, too. It was coming from right where you're sitting now."

They carefully extracted themselves from the damaged car. There was a rusted piece of old fuel pump through the engine and pieces of concrete and steel scattered everywhere and Albert still had bare feet. 

"Come on. My phone hasn't miraculously recovered, but it's not too far to the police station."

"The light's not so bright here," Diane said, looking around her with a dazed smile like a kid who'd just walked through the gates of Disneyland. 

Albert had been getting used to the lack of environmental noise, and it was confusing to suddenly hear distant traffic, the wind blowing, birds, someone far away shouting. His ears kept trying to focus on each sound as if it was important, and he wondered if this was how rehabilitated lab animals felt. 

He could hear a police siren, too, and that got closer until he could see the flashing lights approach along the flat, straight street.

"I smell gas!" he called out to Diane and they moved safely away from the wreck of the car to the sidewalk. The car hurtled to a stop right by them, and Detective Macklay, Tammy and Constance piled out. Macklay took one look at the car, which was now smoking, and went at it with his fire extinguisher. 

"Where have you been?" Tammy asked. "It's been two days!" She watched Diane warily, assessing the likelihood of her unexpectedly trying to kill them. 

"He crossed over to find me," Diane told her. "And yes, I am me."

"Pleased to finally meet you," Tammy told her, with a shy smile. "And, about Linda –"

Albert could see Constance hanging back by Macklay's car. She too looked wary. 

"I'm still the same person. As far as I can ascertain," Albert told her. 

"You vanished into a switchboard! You've been missing for two days, and then you show up in a…a teleported vehicle stuck in the pile of bricks I've been recording! This falls right into the department of 'weird'. Can you explain it? At all?"

He shook his head. "Observationally, sure. Scientifically, absolutely not. Instantaneous travel? Time distortion? Maybe even time travel? If a framework for those things is possible, it's so far ahead of us that I can barely start to understand it. Could I borrow your phone for a moment?"

"Sure." She unlocked it and passed it to him at arm's length, not afraid of him, but cautious of consequences. 

He opened the browser and searched for "Laura Palmer". Too many hits for random women's Facebooks, and none of them news about a murder or a missing girl. "Laura Palmer 1989 Twin Peaks". Nothing. He tried again. "Leland Sarah Palmer Twin Peaks". Yes, there was an obituary for Leland Palmer, recently deceased after a euphemistic "long battle", but he was predeceased by his wife Eileen, not Sarah, and his daughter was named Donna, not Laura. 

"Tammy!" he called out, and she came over, Diane in tow. 

"What's going on?"

"What happened to Laura Palmer?" 

Tammy blinked. "That case is classified."

"You can mention it in front of Diane and Constance. They know enough."

"Okay. There's records of two mutually contradictory cases involving a Laura Palmer in the files. The first is about a girl murdered in the town of Twin Peaks 1989. The second is about a girl of the same name who went missing, rather than being murdered, around the same date. However, nobody I've spoken to – including you, Albert – remembers anything about either case. Even though there's an autopsy report, signed by you. Or about the lead agent, a Dale Cooper. There's no record of him in the Bureau, or anywhere at all."

Albert passed a hand over his eyes. "Nothing? What about Phillip Jeffries? What does Gordon say?"

"Jeffries, the agent who went missing in Buenos Aires? Gordon reported meeting with him while he was still supposedly in Argentina, but there's nothing further. Gordon says he doesn't remember anything about this Agent Cooper, either, but he's cagey about it."

"Do you think we'll be able to find him?" Diane asked Albert. 

"This is, what, the third major iteration, at least? There's no reason to presume it's the last. Coop might be lost, and he might have taken Laura with him, but there's more of us on the case. We'll find him." 

As he spoke, Albert glanced over at Constance, who was standing further away from the group, her arms folded and her facial expression severe. Albert knew exactly what she was feeling: it was what he'd felt not so long ago when he'd been left to be the grounded one, while everyone else had their adventures and their contradictions and the ability to act on them. But now that he was on the other side of that, he could understand more of their decisions, especially Gordon, Diane and Coop's. He'd lost a certain trust that he had in the mechanics of the world, and that doubt wasn't external to him anymore, as it had been when he'd seen the entity known as BOB possess Leland Palmer, or Cooper and Diane vanish from the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department. It was a part of him, and no amount of professional detachment would resolve that feeling of being apart from the world, an inductee into a new way of looking. 

"Constance – we could use someone else on this thing, someone who isn't here for personal reasons. Someone whose starting point is 'weird' rather than the end point."

"I'll think about it," she said, but she was turning away as she did. 

He still had her phone, with Gordon's number in it, so he dialled that. 

"WHO IS THIS?"

"Gordon, it's Albert Rosenfield. I'm back."

"YOU WENT SOMEWHERE? AFTER I WARNED YOU?" Gordon said.

"It looks as if things have revised again and nobody remembers Coop, or Laura Palmer."

There was a long pause at the other end. "I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO. YOU'RE NOT PROTECTED."

"I have Diane."

"ALBERT! WHY WOULD YOU BURY THE LEDE IN THE FUNNY PAGES? DIANE? IS SHE ALL RIGHT? DOES SHE KNOW HER NAME?"

"She is, and she does," Albert said.

"WELL THANK GOD FOR SMALL MERCIES, ALBERT. GET YOURSELF BACK HERE ASAP AND DON'T LET HER GET AWAY AGAIN."

"Not a problem, Gordon." He ended the call. Constance was already peering with professional interest at the recently materialised car. He needn't have worried: her curiosity would lead her deeper into this case, just as it had led Albert. 

The jazz club was busy on a Friday night, but Albert was a regular and they held him a table. Denise, Tammy and Gordon were there already, and Diane had come with Albert. She was staying with him for the moment, not wanting to return to Philadelphia where her doppelganger had lived her life for over twenty years. 

"This music is much better," Denise told Albert with a smile as he and Diane took their seats. 

"I seem to remember you were perfectly happy to dance with me last time we were here," Albert retorted. 

"You dance?" Tammy said with naked shock on her face. 

"I'm full of surprises."

"YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO SPEAK UP. MY HEARING AIDS ARE USELESS HERE," Gordon gestured at the volume control. "WHY ARE WE MEETING HERE ANYWAY?"

Constance appeared at Albert's shoulder, and took the last seat. "Yes, Albert, why here? It was a long flight from South Dakota, I've only got the weekend off, and I'm not dressed for a jazz club."

"Thanks for coming, Constance. The last member of our group, Harry Truman, isn't in a fit state to travel, but Tammy's going to loop him in on speaker."

Tammy nodded. "I've set up Gordon's hearing aids with a text to speech app, so I'll keep him up to date, too."

"I HEAR IT!" Gordon sounded delighted. 

Albert looked around at the group of people who cared about Coop or the truth or both. "Our goal is to find Dale Cooper, and unravel the weirdness –" he glanced at Constance since he was using her term – "surrounding him. All cards on the table, Gordon, because secrecy only got us twenty-five years of nothing and a Diane we didn't even realise wasn't Diane."

Diane put her hand on Albert's. 

"Tonight," Albert said, and cleared his throat, feeling the spirit of Coop running through him. "But tonight, we are here as friends and a fine group of people who hold the light of truth as our best defence against the darkness." He raised his beer bottle. "To Dale Cooper, and to us!"

"To Dale Cooper and to us!" they all echoed, with a frenzy of glass and bottle clinking, then drinking deep. 

"To Dale Cooper, and to us," Harry Truman's croaky voice echoed from Tammy's phone, and Albert raised his bottle to Truman's fight, too. 

Dale was the ghost at this table, Albert knew, but even that shadow presence was more than they'd had in a long time. They would not let him slip away again.


End file.
